Isle of the Blue Dolphins
by Bibliotecaria.D
Summary: Humans aren't the only sentient species on Earth, and they're not even the most dangerous to Cybertronians.
1. Pt 1: Activation

_Humans aren't the only sentient species on Earth, and they're not even the most dangerous to Cybertronians._

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 **Title:** Isle of the Blue Dolphins

 **Warning:** Slave coding, pain, a really bad pun. Body, er, mutilation/involuntary organ manufacturing? Sex slavery/bestiality? Sort of? It is a bizarre fic, so it's on you if you read it.

 **Rating:** R

 **Continuity:** G1

 **Characters:** Blast Off, Onslaught, Brawl, Vortex, Swindle (Combaticons).

 **Disclaimer:** The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

 **Motivation (Prompt):** An idea occurred to me. Slave coding fics never seem to fixate Cybertronians on humans - or comparable Earth creatures. I wrote a what-if about exactly that happening, and it evolved to incorporate a really bad pun, and it's stayed one of my favorite WTFanfics. I figured it's about time to pull it out of Candy From Strangers.

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 **Pt. 1: Activation**

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It was officially the worst day of Blast Off's life. Frag the spark box or the Detention Centre. Who cared about Starscream and a forced gestalt spark merge. Megatron who? Loyalty programming what?

No, this was the worst day by far. Yesterday had been a close second, but today took the oil.

A high-pitched squeal cut through his gloomy thoughts.

Blast Off winced and ducked his head, _knowing_ he wasn't being chastised but unable to stop the automated program backlash. Logic had no power, here. The words pressed against the back of his teeth until he said them out loud: "I apologize, Master."

There was another squeal and a splash, and he knew that it was a reaction to hearing him speak, not an actual response to what he said. Knowing didn't stop his programming from kicking him in the back of the cortex. _He_ knew what he'd been thinking and what it implied, and it was nothing good.

H _e_ flinched toward the sand of the beach in a groveling bow that did his abraded forearms no good. In his own mind, he deserved the gritty pain. "Please, Lord and Master, forgive your humble servant."

Slave drones had no opinions. Obedience was black or white, and he had to stay in the white. That meant his mechanical brain powered through every thought he held in a relentless search for orders, approval, and obedience to those two essentials to his new life. Intent, irony, sarcasm, and despair were disregarded. Slave drones had no more independence than mere machines.

So Blast Off was capable of comprehending that the chirping clicks from the water weren't expressing disapproval his thoughts. Or at least it wasn't likely. He couldn't exactly understand what they _were_ expressing, but it didn't _matter_. The code rooted under his conscious mind sucked his own awareness of his thoughts down to pass judgment on them. Since he was aware that his thoughts would be disapproved of by an owner, the coding kicked in to punish him. The only way to appease it was to cower in apology.

He was doing this to himself. It was awful. He could feel it happen. He could think about how he hated it. Then he promptly fell over himself in fear of the punishment he inflicted on himself for that hatred.

Blast Off knew programming imperatives. The loyalty software Shockwave and Starscream had forced onto the Combaticons lurked in their hindbrains, a constant watchdog program policing the combiner team's thoughts and behavior. It made them do certain things, mostly centered on instant, unquestioning obedience to Lord Megatron's will. Blast Off found the compulsions annoying, but all in all, loyalty programming wasn't a bad deal compared to execution or, worse, return to the spark box.

Bowing before the Supreme Commander was the sensible action, anyway. Not pleasant at times, but regular Decepticon soldiers were expected to at least salute. Obedience and respect were usually enforced by rigorous training instead of loyalty programming, but the forced compulsion to obey wasn't _that_ different from the ingrained habits of a dutiful soldier.

This, however? This wasn't that kind of program. Lord Megatron didn't want drones for soldiers, after all. The loyalty program monitored specific thought trees, terminating any that branched out to actions that were on its list. The slave code…didn't operate the same way. At all.

The splashing became demanding. Blast Off moved before he entirely knew why, the slave coding knocking his conscious mind off its feet and substituting a drone's automated obedience. He didn't want to do this, but at the same time, he did. The coding made him anxious to obey.

Still on his knees, the massive shuttleformer shuffled half into the water without regard for how the stirred water immediately filled his knee joints with silt. Salt crusts and sand already covered him from his initial plunge into the shallows. Repeated immersion wasn't doing him any good, but it wasn't hurting him further. Glum but aware he couldn't fight, he lowered his hands into the water. "Is this more pleasing, Master?"

Slippery organic flesh began wriggling around and through his fingers as the happy pod of dolphins used his hands as a playground.

Since language was a, ahem, bit of a barrier in this situation, Blast Off's strict subconscious judge interpreted that as an affirmative. Tense shoulders relaxed fractionally, and the slave coding eased off its control.

Blast Off seethed without attempting to move. It was a battle he already knew he couldn't win. He'd used up the last of his willpower fighting the coding yesterday, and now he was sickly resigned to being an obstacle course. He couldn't even manage revulsion at the organic filth covering him. The coding hijacking his central cortex insisted on rewarding him for making his Master happy just as relentlessly as it punished him for perceived displeasure. The rubbery touch of the creatures bumping into his hands sent a slick flood of pleasure coursing down his back, and his internal systems knotted.

His optics stayed fixed on the speckled form of his owner, Lord, and center of his slagging world. The accursed slave code had locked on this one dolphin, and Blast Off _could not_ lose sight of it. He'd nearly glitched two days earlier when he'd lost track of the single dolphin in the pod's antics, the animals milling about in a group of similar shapes and colors that all looked the same until he'd finally, frantically pried an identifying characteristic out of his scattered memories. His Master was pale gray with darker markings across his head and a lighter underbelly. There was a scar across the animal's snout. There was a notch in his dorsal fin.

He'd made himself memorize every individual marking on this particular dolphin the moment his fuel pump had stopped pounding. Well, and the moment he'd been able to raise his forehelm out of the shallow water where the coding had slammed him down to beg forgiveness for whatever disobedience had led his Lord and Master to abandon him. The coding wasn't merciful toward displeasing behavior in the slave it controlled. Any fault automatically belonged to the slave, not the owner.

The dolphins whistled and clicked, still excited and playful as they dove through his fingers. Blast Off checked the time and swallowed uneasily. After three days of this humiliating routine, he knew what was coming. Once the sun ceased to shine warmly at the right angle to entertain the pod chasing glitters off his plating in the water, they would leave the shallows around this island. He assumed they went off to chase schools of fish for sustenance. Which would be fine - fantastic! Wonderful! Time to himself to slog to land and let his self-repair stop repairing constant salt water damage and start repairing his thrusters! - except for the abandonment issue.

There was also a related problem becoming rapidly more urgent. "Master," Blast Off started without much hope, "please, may I refuel?" He _knew_ an animal couldn't understand him, but the coding pressed on him until he surrendered, saying the words as he would to any other owner. It wouldn't _allow_ him to think of his Lord and Master as anything but as equally intelligent to himself, if not smarter. "Master, I beg you grant me permission today. My fuel levels are very low."

The dolphins squealed. Their frolicking headed toward deeper water, and Blast Off lurched in purely system-level panic, fuel pump rate beginning to pick up. Knowing it was imposed by the slave coding didn't make instant terror easier to endure.

"Master, please! What have I done?"

He knew what he'd done. Cosmos had gotten a lucky hit, the cogsucker, and Blast Off had taken a header from the upper atmosphere straight into the shallows of this tropical sea. While it was a minor miracle he'd regained enough lift not to plow full speed into the water, every strut in his body ached from the rattling smash of a nasty crash. The impact had stripped his nosecone down to the circuitry and left his belly tender from cracked plating. Transforming out of altmode had been agonizing. Limping across the seabed to the closest landmass had been worse yet. The worst part had been the nauseating realization that escaping the water hadn't stopped the nightmare.

The crash had shaken Blast Off all the way down to basic programming and activated a latent code every Cybertronian possessed. Usually, it wasn't a code that anyone worried about because the slimy, multi-tentacled bastards that had once enslaved Cybertron hadn't been seen since before the Golden Age. The Quintessons were Cybertron's monsters under the berth: part myth, part real history, but mostly just a fear in the dark.

But the slavers were still a legitimate threat considering the fact that Autobot and Decepticon alike had the coding to override independent thought at the command of one of them - or at the command of a similar enough sentient creature. Not a new thing to be worried about by any means, and the one thing their species united against. No matter how soft the Autobots appeared, not even Optimus Prime would have befriended the humans if they'd fit any of the similarity criteria.

Slagging _Pit_ , what Blast Off wouldn't give to be enslaved to a human. A human could _speak_ . They had moral standards and complex ethics. Blast Off could have stomped his pride down enough to be a meek, defenseless slave long enough to play off of that. Even if the Decepticons didn't outright destroy Earth to eliminate humanity after that, the Autobots still would have put a stop to anything well before he'd have had to fear being turned over to a government for expementation.

However, Blast Off wasn't that lucky. His owner, Lord, and Master was no human. No, he'd run nosecone-first into the unwelcome discovery that the Autobots and Decepticons had relied too heavily on humankind's self-centered assumptions about this world. The humans believed that they were the only sentient species on the planet. They believed wrongly.

He'd come online half-buried in the soft sand at the bottom of this shallow sea, poked awake by a marine mammal who apparently registered barely high enough on the galactic market's scale of sentience to trigger a comparison scan by his now-active coding. And the gear-licking smear of organic filth _fit the criteria_ .

Ah, no. No, no, Blast Off hadn't just -

He surged to his feet, almost falling forward in his haste, and lifted one hand after the pod splashing away. "Master, I'm sorry! I apologize humbly for my disloyal thoughts; please, I meant no disrespect!" Pain slashed across his mind and whipped across his wings in blaring feedback and self-activation from his sensor network. He kept his voice down as much as he could despite the agony. The sliver of his mind that remained rational knew that loud noises would scare the animals away. "Master, have mercy!"

His knees gave way, dumping him gracelessly back into the water. The afternoon sunlight was suddenly far too bright to tolerate, and Blast Off offlined his optics. Pain sensors lit in blazing trails up and down his back as if an invisible whip scourged his circuitry.

Bending double over his knees, he suffered in shaking silence. He knew the pattern. The end of this punishment only meant the next wave would begin.

The dolphins were going further out to sea. It happened every day. The beasts had to eat. They probably only returned to this beach because this was where Blast Off, stunned and reeling, had dragged his sorry wrecked aft. Dolphins were intelligent enough to be curious about an anomaly. He encouraged their curiosity, however much he hated himself for it. They loved to play and investigate, and the slave coding compelled Blast Off to fulfill his new owner's desire for entertainment.

When the need to eat drew the pod away, the mech's Master gave no indication that he wished Blast Off to follow him. Lacking explicit dismissal, the coding interpreted that as abandonment and punished him accordingly. There was no rationalizing with the code. Abandonment was the fault of the slave. Never was the owner to blame. Blast Off didn't even have the freedom to _think_ that.

"Master, **please** ..."

His throat closed on his plea as another shrill of pain rippled over his sensor network. It set of secondary sensors in a cascade effect, and Blast Off hunched over further. His tanks were running on empty, and his punishment was just beginning. Desperation fought the coding and lost.

This was the worst day of his whole life.

Water splashed nearby, something soft brushing the hand he'd dropped limp into the water. The shuttleformer reset his optics and struggled to focus his pain-blurred vision.

"…M…Master?"

Oh, thank _Primus_ ! The pain cleared in rush of urgent need to serve. His speckled master had returned to dive in among his fingers. Blast Off dared open his hand, and the dolphin slid up onto his palm in a slosh of water and clicks. He ran a knuckle up his owner's belly, earning a pleased squeal in return.

Pleasure flushed down his backstruts, and he couldn't contain the whimper of a needy, powerless mech crawling for his owner's attention. "Master, please, I need fuel. Please, Master. Let me fuel, Master."

He'd tried following his owner out to sea the first day, compelled by the coding, but the attempt had quickly failed when his injured body began throwing warnings at him. He'd been forced to turn back to shore, begging forgiveness every step of the way. The pod had swum around him curiously for a while but soon left him behind. After that, the slave coding interpreted the lack of summons to mean that his owner and Lord didn't wish accompaniment.

Hence, abandonment and punishment. Also starvation, because slaves weren't allowed to so much as intake fuel without permission.

A fish suddenly darted out from shadows cast by Blast Off's frame, and the dolphin took off in pursuit.

Shoulders slumped, Blast Off kept his hand where it'd been abandoned like a toy on the playground. Exactly like that, in fact. If his master considered him a toy, then a toy he was. His tanks pinged him incessantly. The slave coding sternly berated him via a flicker of pain across his wings for daring to wish he could do anything without his owner's approval.

As fast as the animal zipped away, he returned. There was a firm nudge to Blast Off's palm. The shuttleformer bent closer to the water, optics zooming in on - a fish? His Lord and Master was pushing a fish into his hand?

Fish. Sustenance, for this particular species of mammal. Of course an animal couldn't fuel from energon, so yes! Yes, it was a gift! An indication that his owner wished him to fuel, right?

He winced slightly, waiting for the coding to punish him for his presumption, but nothing happened.

He'd…he'd done the right thing. Blast Off had thought as a humble slave should.

A humiliation in and of itself, but right now he couldn't scrape together indignation. "Thank you, Master," Blast Off blurted as stark relief flooded him. He delicately pinched the gift between two fingers and laying it on his comparatively massive hand. The tiny silver thing flopped in an unappealing way. The slave coding told him it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever been given and he should express profound appreciation for it. " **Thank** you, Master. I'm grateful, Master."

Gratitude didn't spare him the inevitable as the dolphin squeal-clicked, swimming off toward the distant dorsal fins of the rest of pod. The slave coding still chose to interpret that as abandonment. Punishment began immediately.

Shaking and wretchedly miserable, Blast Off dragged himself back up onto the beach. His free hand went to his head as if to cushion his aching processors. His other hand, of course, cradled the precious fish close. He kept it pressed over his spark even as he opened his cargo bay to dig his emergency rations out.

The energon fed his self-repair systems and eventually his communications array would come back online. That wouldn't do anything about his owner. He had no idea how the other Combaticons would react to his slave coding being activated and imprinting, much less what the rest of the Decepticons would do. Not that he wanted anything to be done about his Lord and Master! No, not Blast Off! Blast Off was his Master's loyal slave!

The shuttleformer buried his face in his hands and groaned quietly as he punished himself yet again.

This was officially the worst day of his life. Unfortunately, tomorrow wasn't looking any better.

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	2. Pt 2: Infection

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 **Pt. 2: Infection**

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The rescue hadn't gone as planned. In fact, it'd been a complete failure.

Instead of landing on the island and supplying Blast Off with the fuel they'd assumed he lacked in order to complete self-repair and lift off, the other Combaticons had been forced to hold down the shuttle to forcefeed him the cubes of energon. He'd clearly been delirious, or so Onslaught had thought at the time. Now he realized that Blast Off's incoherent raving and jerky motions had been an attempt to fight the slave coding. The shuttleformer had tried to warn them away before - well, before this. Before the coding detected their proximity-opened gestalt-links and activated the rest of the unit.

Rescue had turned into joining Blast Off as slaves little better than drones, and to what? A fragging marine _animal_ , of all the species in the cosmos!

Pain spiked across Onslaught's sensor network, and he made a low, rough noise before deactivating his vocalizer. The blasted coding expressed its disapproval of his disrespect, even if he hadn't said a word out loud. Agony lashed his cannons in broad stripes. It felt as though his plating was being peeled back and acid poured onto the bared circuitry underneath.

Onslaught's fists curled into tight fists hidden by how he held his arms loosely crossed atop his knees. He refused to show more weakness than that, although the constant punishment had worn him down. A mech could only take so much self-inflicted agony before seeking any means to placate the slave code. Submission earned a respite he dearly needed at this point.

Tortured into hasty reconsideration of his uncomplimentary thoughts, the Combaticon commander turned his mind toward flattery. Humble admiration. Self-abasement, making himself dwell on his unworthiness in comparison to a dolphin's rubbery-fleshed charms, concentrating hard on _not thinking_ about how little he meant such thoughts. His loathing was buried under total focus on dolphins as the perfect species, the epitome of evolution on Earth. They had many lovely features that he listed in detail, slow and thorough, one at a time so he could truly meditate on them, filling his mind with nothing but devotion. He couldn't imagine a more noble beast. They were wondrous creatures.

Anything to appease the coding scorching his processors to burnt slag.

The pain eventually ebbed. Onslaught took care to summon a sense of gratitude to the forefront of his thoughts for the coding to pick up on. He'd learned his lesson on that. A slave either held to proper behavior or was taught to behave via punishment.

When his vision finally stopped fritzing out into static, Onslaught lifted his forehelm off his arms and glanced around. Nothing much had changed while he'd been occupied. Beside him, Swindle sighed and wiggled his tires to sink a little deeper in the sand. On the Jeep's other side, Vortex lay flat. He had his face burrowed into the sand, arms clamped over his helm in a defensive pose. Onslaught doubted he'd sprawled out that way for comfort. Convenience seemed more likely. Every half an hour or so, a distinctive shudder wracked Vortex's rotor blades, and muffled sounds came from under sheltering arms. Onslaught could guess what the sounds were, since the rest of the Combaticons had recited more than their fair share to their absent…Master.

Beyond Vortex's miserably groveling, Brawl sulked. He had his legs pulled up to his prominent chest as he glared at the ocean as if it was to blame for the code ruling him. He'd already thrown a temper tantrum, demolishing everything on this tiny island he could destroy: shrubs, skittering lizards, even the lone hill that made this island more than an exposed sandbar in the middle of a shallow sea. Black, tarry smoke rose in a column to smudge the sky. Onslaught would have stopped him out of concern for attracting human attention and then - inevitably - Autobots, but numb disbelief had held him inactive while Brawl's temper ran its course. Now the island was a wreck, and the tank had exhausted his rage enough to join the rest of the team sitting on the beach.

At the end of the row of Combaticons, Blast Off shifted restlessly. Loud clicks and clanks came from his direction in a steady stream. Brawl kept twitching and looking at him funny.

Onslaught accessed the gestalt-links to check Blast Off's status. Part of him flinched from bringing the combiner tech online again, but what else could the shuttle possibly do to him? The slave code had activated; the entire team was enslaved. They were all in this together, and so help him Primus, Onslaught was still the commander of this sorry excuse for a unit.

They'd forced a full tank on Blast Off upon arrival. According to Onslaught's read-out, that had declined sharply in the last several hours. "Blast Off. Has your self-repair completed major repairs?"

His question didn't earn so much as a glance down the row. "Yes," was grunted vaguely in his direction.

"Your fuel levels are still dropping." Onslaught put enough steel in his voice to make it more than a statement.

And Blast Off answered the implied question after a long pause, sounding as though he hated his life, the universe, and everything. "…the coding is changing my body to fit new criteria."

Vortex lifted his head out of his arms to stare in horror. "It can do that?" He twisted in the sand to stare in unconscious appeal at Onslaught. "It can't do that! I don't want to change to fit some squishy's - **erk!** " He flinched violently. The slave coding had evidently caught on to his less-than-submissive train of thought, something not permitted in a good slave-drone. With ruthless efficiency, it immediately began to discipline the unruly slave.

Vortex curled up on the sand, arms jerking inward to protect himself. It did absolutely nothing to ward off the instant agony. Soon enough, he began making those whimpering, apologetic noises the Combaticons had become familiar with.

Not that they spared him any sympathy, as they were too concerned with their own problems. Onslaught checked his own fuel levels and felt his tanks sink at the unexpected drop. That did _not_ bode well. He accessed his self-repair, dreading what it would tell him.

The list was long but added up to relatively few physical changes once he sorted them out. Coloration shifts, seals being manufactured around his doors, cannons, and air vents - a floatation device?! What?!

Okay, no. No. Wait. He could understand the changes once he stood back to look at the larger picture. If he had to be immersed in ocean water in order to serve his new owner, being more waterproof and being able to float probably made sense. The changes weren't as bad as he'd feared, to be honest. He wasn't sure why his colors had to change, but he didn't care about _that_ .

"My life as a dolphin's bitch: the true story," Swindle said bitterly, transforming out of altmode to plop down on the sand with his legs akimbo.

Onslaught blinked at him. He had to look the word up. "Bitch would require you to be canine." They were changing to adapt to a marine mammal, if anything.

"Colloquial slang. The implication is that I'm the unofficial housewife of the - of our Master." One thing in Swindle's favor was the speed he adapted to any situation, no matter how strange. He barely slipped up before correcting himself, and the coding let it slide.

"What's a housewife?" Brawl asked from further down the line.

Vortex lifted his head and blew sand out his helm vents. "Female human, usually found in a servile role in a relationship."

"Swindle ain't a human," the tank said suspiciously, as if the conmech was trying to trick him again.

"He's not female, either." Vortex eased his hands open where they'd closed into pain-seized claws. Acting as though nothing had happened, he rolled up onto his side to sweep the smallest Combaticon from helm to tires with a profoundly lewd look. It had a tired edge. Vortex was doing his best to appear normal but wasn't succeeding, and Swindle didn't grace his leering with a reaction. Vortex gave up and twisted around to look at Brawl instead. "He's referring to the fact that we're gonna fall all over ourselves to serve our new Lord and Master as soon as," he faltered, and the Combaticons winced as one as the slave coding lashed them, "he returns. Wh-when he comes back."

Brawl held his head in both hands. His motor chugged in thick, painful cycles. "He **is** coming back, yeah? Yeah?!" They weren't such failures their Master had abandoned them here on this island permanently, right?

They all knew the answer. Blast Off had bleakly filled them in on the normal schedule of the dolphin pod, speaking the whole time in a dead-voiced monotone. Yet the whole team couldn't help but shoot him anxious looks of inquiry now, almost begging the shuttle for reassurance. As much as they hated the newly activated coding - and they really, truly did hate it - being separated from their owner _hurt_ . The coding kept punishing them, turning their bodies on them. The pain made them angry at their Master for his absence and ownership and it didn't matter what all they were angry about because resentment earned _more_ punishment until they buckled, willpower worn tissue-thin and sparks cringing in their chests at the idea of further defiance.

Then came the long, humiliating period of convinced the coding that they were sufficiently submissive and humble. No, no, they weren't angry. They accepted the pain as the discipline they had earned by their behavior, and they had reformed. They were _good_ slaves who were obedient and loyal and would never think thoughts of hatred and violence against their Lord and Master.

Blast Off dipped his chin in a curt nod. Relief and self-disgust flooded the others in equal amounts.

"None of us are a bitch," Onslaught said to end the discussion. He'd had time to look up the word and cross-reference it with popular media. "The other connotation is explicitly sexual, if not gender-specific. Dolphins are not compatible with our species in that way."

"Wait, so if we're not his bitches, what are we?" Trust Brawl to ask that.

"We're his slaves," Vortex said, speaking insultingly slow. "Obviously."

"No! I mean, yeah, but," Brawl waved a hand, trying to illustrate his point, "even slaves got different jobs. If we aren't bitches - "

"Stop using that word," Blast Off ordered, oddly irritated. The strange clicking from his self-repair system had only gotten louder. Even from here, Onslaught's passive scanners picked up the excess heat sheeting off him. What kind of changes was the slave coding inflicting on the shuttle?

"Uhhh…" Brawl thought for a second. "…housewives. If we aren't housewives, what are we?"

That was actually an interesting question. Swindle sat up straight as Onslaught turned to look down the line. Vortex pushed up out of the sand to sit back on his heels. Silence blanketed the beach as the enslaved mechs delved into the active code at work inside them, looking for what role they'd been slotted into. A lone slave might be a jack-of-all-trades serving one owner, but the Combaticons were an integrated unit. The coding had certainly recognized that when it forced Blast Off to transmit the activation sequence to the rest of them. The likelihood of being designated as a 'type' of slave was fairly high, as their prior connection as a unit made divvying up duties simple.

"I think I'm a bodyguard?" Brawl ventured.

That resonated with Onslaught. "So am I."

"What the frag?" Vortex muttered. "Transport? That doesn't make any sense. Or - aw, frag, I get it." He squirmed, looking queasy. "That explains why self-repair's modding my interior seals to keep water **in** instead of out. Oh, yuck. It's gonna be **inside** me." Panic flashed across his visor. "He! Our Master! Who has every right to be wherever he wants! I-I didn't mean - " Groaning low, the helicopter fell prostrate in the sand again. His rotor blades shivered as the slave coding proceeded to brutally punish his disloyal thoughts.

Onslaught looked away, uncomfortable. The way the slave coding worked, they were sabotaging themselves. "Swindle?"

"I'm not sure." Swindle shrugged. "Butler? Accountant? Estate manager?" Hands flexing helplessly in the sand, the conmech stared out to sea. "This is…I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I mean, I'm in the process of signing over every single one of my accounts to - to someone the humans don't even recognize as sentient. The official documentation is piling up, and I have no idea how it - um, our Master is going to sign off on them. The coding's pressuring me to hand over ownership of my assets immediately, but how does that **work** on a planet where he can't hold citizenship or full personhood anywhere? Should I hold the money in trust? Am I allowed to do that? I have purchases lined up ready for approval, but I don't know if he wants them or how to ask. Can we even interpret anything from dolphin into a language we understand?"

"Not often," Blast Off put in. "I hope you were fueled up before you arrived, because if you haven't discovered it yet, we can only fuel with permission."

Onslaught twitched. And wasn't that horrible news, considering the rate the modifications were burning through their fuel levels.

"What kind of purchases?" he asked Swindle. There wasn't any point in dwelling on what he couldn't change, after all.

Swindle made a depressed sound like a tire deflating. Money was slipping through his fingers the longer he waited for a decision from an authority figure who couldn't give him orders. "Toys to amuse him. Shipments of fish. The deed to this island and surrounding reef."

"You can afford to buy an **island** ?"

The conmech smiled weakly as Onslaught glared at him. "Might have forgotten to tell you I have a Swiss bank account or four on the side."

"Yes, you did!"

"So what're you?" Brawl poked Blast Off in the side. The shuttle's engine roared angrily for a second, but Brawl was more concerned with staring at his own hand. "Wow, you're really overheating. You okay?"

That caught Onslaught's attention. Still glaring at Swindle, he barked, "Blast Off! Sitrep ping, **now**."

It took a minute. Fortunately, although the slave coding now registered Blast Off as 'first and favorite' in their new internal hierarchy, the gestalt-link still had priority when it came to status updates. Blast Off glowered at the sand but eventually pinged a full system report to his commander.

Who promptly attempted to swallow his own vocalizer. " **What in Primus' name** \- "

"I'm the bitch," Blast Off said coldly before the other three Combaticons could annoy him with their curiosity.

His flat statement cut through their own personal Pits. The whole unit reset their visors and wondered if they'd heard that right. Onslaught was still sputtering.

"…what?" someone asked. It might have been Vortex.

Blast Off huffed air out every vent and repeated himself louder. Why not? It wasn't true humiliation unless they were all aware of his new status. "I'm the bitch. I'm our Master's new pleasure slave."

The sound Swindle made was what Onslaught imagined a drowning Teletraan drone model would make. "Wh-what?"

A broad ping went out to them all. Even Vortex choked on air when the shuttle's new schematics popped up on his HUD.

"That's not **possible** ," someone insisted, sounding sick. Onslaught was too sunk in horror to recognize his own voice.

"It's possible," Blast Off spat. "Our Lord and Master is a mammal, and mammals in general are all about reproductive imperative. So my body is reformatting itself to - to cater to his needs." He - _she_ finally looked as ill as the rest of them felt. "The…the aperture along my back in altmode is..." She turned her head away, ashamed. "You can guess, I'm sure. And the structure inside my cargo bay is a - I believe it's supposed to be a," broad shoulders hunched in futile defense, "a womb. Of some kind."

"I'm going to purge," Vortex said matter-of-factly. "You're turning into a freak."

Blast Off just huddled there in the sand radiating heat, a hopeless slave-drone reformatting for improved service. "My main duty as a slave is now mating and gestation. I can't really do that without becoming…compatible."

Onslaught had no idea what to say. He knew he should say _something_ , but what exactly did a mech say to someone being forced to take on the anatomy of an organic species in order to serve as - what, a pseudo-mate and carrier of young? Was that even physically possible? Would Blast Off start generating the organic genetic material necessary to _create_ dolphin young? Oh. That was…ugh. No. Horrible. Horror and sympathy fought in his vocalizer, and only static buzzed out.

Brawl suddenly stood up and walked around to sit on Onslaught's other side. Blast Off blinked and watched him go, confused. A second later she understood, and Onslaught smacked Brawl upside the head as the shuttle's visor narrowed in a spiteful, hateful expression. Provoking her was a bad idea!

"You know," Blast Off said, thoughtful and sadistic, "dolphins aren't monogamous. The more mating possible, the happier our Master will be."

The Combaticons stared at each other. There was a nearly audible _clunk_ as the slave coding processed that bit of information.

Brawl whimpered.

Onslaught sighed hot air and turned to glumly stare out over the water again. His HUD helpfully updated to reflect the changes self-repair had planned. "…well played, you fragger. Well played."

Beside him, Brawl began making pathetic little sounds. Swindle had his head in his hands, making a similar set of sounds.

Vortex tilted his head to the side and asked, "Wait, does this make us a harem?"

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**


	3. Pt 3: Promotion

**[* * * * *]**

 **Pt. 3: Promotion**

 **[* * * * *]**

* * *

The second island they settled on was approximately the same size as the first, but they'd never know for certain. The scrubby sandbar Blast Off had lived on for days was gone, scattered over the ocean in a fit of anger. Brawl's short temper had snapped completely once his self-repair changed plans.

The other Combaticons dully watched from their patch of beach as Brawl dug up the rest of the island and pitched it in every direction. They didn't object.

They should have. It turned out that explosions, smoke, and chunks of plantlife hurled into the ocean scared dolphins. Who knew, right? Well, they knew _now_ , which wasn't terribly helpful. Hindsight merely ground in how stupid they were not to anticipate their owner's reaction to a giant metal alien throwing a temper tantrum.

The dolphin pod fled from the violence. The Combaticons were left behind. It took them a full day to figure out why their owner didn't return, and if the previous punishments were unpleasant, they soon learned how bad it could get.

The slave code wouldn't allow them to think of their fleshy Master as a dumb animal motivated by fear, but it was quite capable of searing into their cringing minds that he was shy. He had an aversion to loud, unsettling noises. They should have known better. They _did_ known better. They'd disrupted their Lord and Master's normal feeding and play schedule. They'd _driven away_ their master.

Only bad slaves didn't think of their owner's reactions first and foremost, and oh, had they been bad slaves. They'd caused their Master discomfort, and as a result, he'd abandoned his rude, unworthy, _bad_ slaves.

Yeah, the slave coding went to town on the Combaticons over that.

Vortex curled up into a whimpering ball. Brawl kept randomly blurting half-formed apologies to thin air, then crumpling under a fresh surge of pain as the slave coding decided the tank wasn't remorseful enough. Onslaught remained on his hands and knees, shuddering silently. He was the most withdrawn of any of them throughout the waves of sensor network triggers, but stubborn dignity couldn't outlast their punishment. Muting his vocalizer didn't stop the gasps or clenched fists, and real desperation filled his visor whenever he scanned the horizon looking for any hint of their owner's return.

After hours of howling in self-inflicted, internal pain, they were exhausted. The beach was grooved by the clawing of their hands. Impressions of their faces pitted the sand. Swindle miserably raised the idea of purchasing tow lines, jumper cables, and industrial magnets for the purposes of torture, and the Combaticons flinched in collective dread as the coding clicking through their heads almost audibly changed tracks. Apparently self-punishment was no longer sufficient discipline for such bad slaves.

Blast Off had stoically knelt throughout, forehelm in the sand and vocalizer offline as she suffered. There was no point in struggling, and she already knew begging pardon of her Lord and Master was the only solution the coding would accept. She kept her optics offline, concentrating on accepting the pain as her due. By the fourth hour, her total surrender before the programming earned her some respite, easing off to a simmering pain deep in her wires. It was relief so needed she was ready to do anything the coding prompted.

She assumed the respite came from the coding recognized her submission, but no. No, not quite. It spared her further punishment in order to slot her into a role she never wanted: leader.

A whole directory of hierarchal, mandated actions opened up in her head, and Blast Off was unsettled to discover her position within the new hierarchy was that of the slave in charge. Especially since that discovery came via Brawl hanging from her fist weakly apologizing. Not apologizing to a military leader - Onslaught was standing to one side looking helpless - but to their Master's first and favorite. The head of the harem, as it were.

Slavery shifted military ranking over to what was, to a slave, a more important indicator of authority: their owner's favor.

They didn't even realize the team chain of command had changed until, panicking, the Combaticons found themselves turning to Blast Off for directions. And Blast Off didn't consciously recognize what had happened until she began disciplining Brawl. The slave coding was _that_ insidious.

The shuttle jolted as it hit her what exactly she was doing...and how Brawl hung there taking it as if she had every right to punish him. Which she did, now. According to the activated code. Anything they believed to the contrary was overridden. Mere military rank meant nothing.

Blast Off stopped, hand wrapped around Brawl's barrel, and suppressed the urge to turn to Onslaught for help. Onslaught couldn't help her. None of the other Combaticons were any better off than she, and she was, in fact, in a comparatively enviably position at the moment.

"I screwed up, c'mon, I did, I get it, I **get** it," Brawl was blubbering, but Blast Off shut him out. She had to think.

Fortunately, the directory was well organized. Slaves followed strict rules of proper behavior. Blast Off tentatively explored the files, wincing away from some of the titles but unable to stop a sickening sense of gratitude that at least there were guidelines. Now that she'd stopped fighting the slave coding, most of her errors stemmed from just plain not knowing what to do. This would…help. Once her owner was convinced to accept her back as a slave, of course.

Pain washed over Blast Off's wings like a reminder. She hastily summoned humility to the forefront of her thoughts. Yes, yes, she was a bad slave seeking her owner's approval. Always.

The coding subsided, satisfied.

Blast Off held onto submission a minute longer, too cautious to believe her good fortune. Had she finally worked out a means of working with the slave code? Not around it, obviously, but any method to convince it she was doing as a good slave should gave her a sliver of wiggle room.

The Quintessons had enslaved Cybertron, once upon a time. History noted that Cybertron hadn't stayed enslaved.

But Blast Off was a good slave who would never think about rebellion! No, never. She simply made a note and moved on, delving deeper into the directory in a search for what her new status meant in terms of duties.

It didn't take long to find out what was expected of her. The good news was that head slaves typically took over the small tasks classified as too petty to bother their owner with. Not that the code didn't make her defer at every moment to her master's judgment, but Blast Off was digging for whatever good news she could find. She'd never wanted to be in charge of a harem, but one of the delegated duties was keeping the rest of the slaves in good working order. That included, thank Primus (and their master, always their Master), keeping them fueled.

Blast Off dropped Brawl. "How much energon did you bring?" she asked Onslaught without acknowledging the tank at her feet.

Onslaught looked between her and Brawl, bewildered. Blast Off didn't push him. The mech seemed slightly dazed by everything that was happening, unable to wrap his mind around how the code was changing them. They all had some trouble sorting out what they felt naturally versus what the code imposed on their programming. Turning to Blast Off for orders felt right, accepted without question, but not once they stopped to think about it. They knew better.

Bewilderment gave way to bitter surrender as Blast Off's question sank in, or rather, as it sank in how a question from someone who had been a subordinate now inspired an automatic urge to answer. Onslaught had lost his freedom and his command in one fell swoop.

Something hateful sparked in his visor, but he answered. "Enough to fuel you twice over. We assumed your self-repair would need at least half a tank to fix you, with a stopover at the main medbay afterward. Scrapper wanted to check you before we returned to base." Meaning that the Constructicons were expecting them at some point in the next week, although Scrapper would likely chalk their absence up to arrogant disregard of medical orders on the part of one or more of them. The Combaticons operated on their own unless the Word of Megatron dictated otherwise.

Blast Off didn't even want to _think_ about a conflict between slave code and loyalty programming. She doubted Starscream and Shockwave had considered code activation when installing the damn programming.

"I'm never gonna say I hate Lord Megatron ever again," Vortex promised fervently from his place in the sand, and Blast Off almost glared at him. They'd all followed the train of thought to get to that feeling, but -

"Don't **think** about it," Onslaught ordered as if that could possibly work.

Vortex's engine revved full-throttle, but all the 'copter did was curl into a tighter ball, whimpering soft apologies. Because of course he'd thought about it. They were all thinking about it to varying degrees now, about how the loyalty programming had been the Pit but obeying Megatron's commands was far, far preferable to serving a fragging _animal._

It took a long time to recover from that thought. Every time Blast Off managed to clear her mind, the slave coding would turn up a hidden wish for rescue, and suddenly Blast Off would be back to swearing up and down that she was _happy_ to be a slave, she was _glad_ her owner was a tiny Earth mammal, dolphins were the _best._

The tide had come in by the time Blast Off recovered. She shifted on the unsteady sand, shuffling up the sliver of remaining island until she was out of the water. There wasn't much land left. She sat in the dry sand watching the moon rise, trying not to listen to the others shiver and moan. Less experienced at giving up hope, they recovered slower than she did.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Swindle recovered next. He crawled up onto the sand beside her. With his lights off and biolighting as dim as his optics, he seemed beaten down. The sound of his self-repair clanking around inside his chassis seemed terribly loud. Blast Off systems were down to an annoying whirr, but they both radiated heat.

"I have an energon converter," Swindle volunteered after a while. He sounded as subdued as he looked. "It's an emergency device meant to turn anything fed into it into something useable, even if it's just a weak grade. I don't know what we can feed into it." He glanced around. "Maybe we can salvage some of the brush. Driftwood? Seaweed and dead fish, I guess. It won't support all of us, but, yeah." But it was something they could use.

Blast Off side-eyed him. They were all in this together, but the situation had to be bad if _Swindle_ was tossing his belongings into the pot.

It was worse than that, even. Vortex was the last Combaticon to drag his sorry aft out of the ocean, and he sighed after flopping down in the sand. "…I got solar panels. I'll set 'em up tomorrow." He avoided all of their optics. When they just kept staring, he hunched his shoulders, rotor blades bristling aggressively. "What?! What'd you think I carry around in my cargo space, Soundwave?!"

Brawl huffed a tired laugh. "Kinky."

"Shut up."

"Why do you have solar panels?" Onslaught asked slowly.

Vortex shot him a glare, thoroughly on the defensive and hating it. "Look, Command don't give me pitslag when they shove a prisoner off on me. Half the time they're injured and leaking, and **nobody** they give me's starts on a full tank. How the frag else am I supposed to keep somebody alive for questioning? Magic? I'm not gonna be held responsible when a prisoner offlines 'cause of somebody's too stupid to give me the energon I need to do my fragging job. And don't say I should just send in a request; I've filled out so many requests I got a template saved to my central cortex." He seemed to take the lack of response personally.

The Combaticons stared at him in silent wonder. Vortex grumbled, wrapping his arms around his knees. They continued staring. It was no secret Vortex liked his job, even enjoyed it to an unnerving extent, but this responsible side was a revelation. It made sense, but huh. Still odd. Interrogation was as much a part of war as tactical meetings and permission briefings, but it was hard to think of Vortex in terms of bureaucracy.

"Yet you can't turn in an after-action report with even a passing resemblance to professionalism," Onslaught said after a while, dryly amused by the contrast.

Vortex scoffed. "You should see my reports to Soundwave. I don't half-aft **them**." Implying a whole host of things to get under Onslaught's plating, but the attempt to needle his commander lacked spite. He turned his head away. "Anyway. Solar panels. They don't generate a lot, but it's better than nothing." Which was what they'd be fueling on once they burned through what they'd brought.

Onslaught shook his head. "It doesn't matter what they generate. We can't refuel without permission." Blast Off had informed them of that before the low fuel warnings began. The issue had become more urgent since then, but with their owner gone there didn't seem much hope for them.

"There's a way to refuel." Blast Off didn't look at any of them, focusing on rubbing salt crusts off her armor instead. She could feel their attention snap to her. Warning them seemed redundant, but she did it anyway. "You won't like it."

Because the good news was that Blast Off could grant them permission to fuel, but the bad news was that even Onslaught had to ask - beg, really, because they were bad slaves and didn't deserve the dignity of asking - for that permission. Blast Off had always hated being a subordinate, but she hated even more being the most powerful of powerless slaves. She didn't want to listen to Onslaught beg, not like this, but the slave code had strict rules they had to abide by. Slaves must be humble before their owner. Humble, and grateful, meaning that Blast Off had to judge the sincerity of the thanks offered in return for every cube she doled out on behalf of their absent owner.

She hated his life.

Being in charge did allow her to pick up the whole unit and relocate on her own initiative. That almost made her horrible promotion worth it. They couldn't just stay here and suffer endlessly. Better to find their owner and pray they could ingratiate themselves back into his good graces.

Bringing them to the second island more than 26 hours later. It took Vortex 19 hours to find the correct dolphin pod. He was the only one of them capable of flying a search pattern without drawing attention from outsiders - the coding had evidently caught onto their desire for rescue and determined isolation the best solution - and his ability to find marine life was a unreliable mix of sensor sweeps and visual inspection. He'd had to wait until dawn before taking off.

Blast Off spent that time systematically doling out punishment to the other Combaticons, who meekly accepted the torture without protest. Onslaught seethed, Swindle babbled nervously, and Brawl just _took_ it and whimpered for more. Conditions hardly improved once they moved. Blast Off had fought the programming but conceded that some further form of penance _had_ to be assigned to the slave who'd stepped out of line. Brawl spent another 6 hours groveling in the water, uselessly begging forgiveness from an animal that couldn't understand anything he said. Whimpering on his knees in the water was better than being punished by his own sensor network or screaming under Blast Off's hands.

Plus, keeping Brawl down via orders meant there wasn't a repeat of the temper tantrum that had started all this.

If nothing else, staying quiet and still in the water appealed to the dolphin pod's curiosity. The animals had been scared off by the violence, not necessarily the alien robots. Those, the dolphins had positive associations with. Once they ventured close enough to shore, Blast Off waded out to reintroduce himself to the pod, and eventually he managed to coax their master into playing.

It made the Combaticons practically giddy. Playing with the head slave implied forgiveness. Sheer sobbing relief when the pain finally _stopped_ collapsed Swindle in a limp pile on the beach reciting praises unto their Lord and Master.

Onslaught had stayed out the way the entirety of the search, keeping to one side as Vortex reported every single movement of their owner in real-time to Blast Off and pointedly not interfering in the others' punishments. He'd quietly submitted to his own discipline at Blast Off's hands, as the slave code demanded. He'd accepted the shuttle's orders when relocating. That didn't mean he was happy about any of it.

Now he stood on the beach watching Blast Off redeem the unit in their owner's eyes. That, as nothing else, cemented the new hierarchy into place in his mind.

"So this is how it is, now," he said while the shuttle cupped massive hands around the small, rubbery form of their lord and master. "You're in charge."

Blast Off kept his visor down, but there was a strange swell of authority in the back of her mind. It was foreign and tasted _wrong_ in a way only a formerly free mech would recognize. "Yes." Onslaught's bitterness was the kind that soaked in and dried into defeat. It wasn't the sort of defeat that could be fought. Blast Off should know; she'd done her share of fighting before giving up.

Onslaught stood on the beach, visor narrowed as he fought it. Still trying. In a distant corner of Blast Off's mind, she pitied the mech.

* * *

 **[* * * * *]**


	4. Pt 4: Adaptation

**[* * * * *]**

 **Pt. 4: Adaptation**

 **[* * * * *]**

* * *

The dolphins splashed and squealed. Blast Off encouraged their activity, turning her hands into an obstacle course and angling her armor so the pod could chase reflected light through the surf. After a while, she managed to coax one particular dolphin up onto the offered palm of her hand so she could lavish attention on him.

Brawl had sat back on his heels by now, and Vortex was sliding step by step closer. The 'copter seemed reluctantly fascinated by their owner's play. Swindle had collected himself out of a limp heap and come to sit in the shallows. He stared at how Blast Off massaged her knuckles on their owner's belly.

A flush of pink spread across the grayish-white skin, and the three Combaticons twitched as the slave code picked up on that. The code assimilated every single information resource available to them. What they knew, it knew. It _was_ them. And one of them, once upon a bored television spree, had watched some sort of nature documentary. The memory had been analyzed down to the commercial breaks by now, and the Combaticons waited uneasily for what the code had noticed this time.

Their lord's skin flush meant something very important to their new priority lists. Swindle and Vortex blinked, confused, but Blast Off's visor narrowed as her repair system pinged her. Well. That wasn't a piece of equipment she wanted to come online. She really didn't, despite how the servile, eager-to-please portion of her subverted by the slave programming did.

Suspicious, Blast Off poked at the equipment activation notice. Why did it come online right this moment?

She traced the activation back to its cause and winced. Oh. That…oh. That's what the color change meant.

Delaying unpleasant things only gave dread time to build into a crushing self-pity and sick despair, however. Even as a slave, Blast Off had marginally more dignity than that left. For the sake of those dregs of control, she was going to choose to go along with the code rather than wait for it to railroad her free will.

It required taking action. Part of her shrank from the thought, but Blast Off swallowed any objections. "Onslaught, come here," she said in a dead voice. Her spark screwed tight as it struck her who she'd ordered around, but the hierarchy established in her head insisted it was her duty to do so. Just as the harem slaves' were bound by duty to obey.

Onslaught fought the order for a long minute while the other Combaticons stared, dumbfounded. Vortex snickered, but it sounded forced. Swindle nervously glanced between commander and favorite slave. Taking sides was a dead end either way. Brawl tried to stand but found his legs weren't ready to cease kneeling yet.

Onslaught resisted, but the slave code won. "Fragging **Pit** ," he snarled, but in the low voice of someone who knew better than to protest. Punishment put a shiver in his knee joints even for that. Head down and hatefully submissive, he sloshed into the water.

Fellow-feeling or not, Blast Off still snapped, "Don't upset him!"

Him being, of course, their owner. The all-important center of their very beings, at this point. Panicking the dolphin pod a second time was a nightmare none of them were ready to face.

Onslaught immediately slowed to a shuffling walk that merely stirred the water. Blast Off concentrated on keeping their Lord and Master distracted with the gentlest stroking she could manage. Her tanks pinched at the result _that_ had. Vortex's laughter was most definitely forced by now, and a layer of despair curdled under the fake amusement.

"Take over," Blast Off ordered, still in that dead level voice. Onslaught winced. " **Now** , Onslaught."

Her (former) leader unwillingly knelt and extended his hands into the water. Their owner, curious as ever, wriggled free of Blast Off's hand in order to investigate. The shuttle coached Onslaught in the basics of dolphin handling while the other Combaticons looked on in envy. Envy with an edge of self-hate thick enough to taste, but envy nonetheless. Onslaught had been chosen to _touch_ their master. The head of the harem had chosen her second-in-command.

Her? Her. Right. Even her gestalt links registered the change. Cybertronian parts were unimportant. Blast Off was apparently now part of the gendered world dictated by which set of genitalia a dolphin possessed. Officially part of it now, since her new-built pleasure-slave modifications had pinged online. Time for a test run.

Which she would take care of as soon as Onslaught got the hang of delicately stroking their owner's, er, equipment. Big metal fingers were not made for handling tiny things. Onslaught's clumsiness was partly from the ridiculous size difference and partly from horror as he realized just what he was…servicing.

Blast Off herself eyed the thing and swallowed. The stiff, S-shaped thing poking out from the rubbery creature was a foregone result of stroking a dolphin this way. There was no point in getting upset. And why would she get upset? No cause for alarm here. Slaves lived to serve, and apparently servitude to organics involved offering excessive opportunities for mating.

Primus spare her this humiliation.

This was the worst day of Blast Off's entire life.

"I'll return soon," she murmured as she stood. Excusing herself from the curious visors and optics turned toward her, she waded slowly back up to the beach and strode out of sight. The other side of the island would have to do. It wasn't a big landmass, but there was privacy enough for a test. Her scattered slivers of dignity were shriveling inside her from what the test required, but she'd salvage what she could. Privacy allowed her tattered pride a momentary stay of execution until the real deal replaced the tests.

What pride she could possibly retain through the unexpected side effects of the test, anyway.

That was - that -

 _That._

In all likelihood, that was what the mating fuss was about. It explained a lot about why Earth in general obsessed about sex. It was nothing like Blast Off expected, and it took her a while to recover enough just to stand up. Joints didn't want to work, and her core systems had overheated almost to red-line levels.

Also, she _throbbed_ in a way that made her want to, uh, repeat the test. To be 100% sure the mods were operating correctly, of course. Because as repulsive as the procedure was, she'd never felt anything like it. Being squicked and rampantly aroused at the same time was as uncomfortable as it sounded. Blast Off felt shamed but guiltily titillated.

Primus help her. She wasn't supposed to _enjoy_ this slag!

Regardless of what she wanted, her body felt otherwise. Her body _loved_ it. The mods ticked along, every light green, and Blast Off desperately wished she could turn the blasted things off.

She was shuddering slightly from continued feedback when she returned to the group. Fortunately, none of them noticed. They were busy with their own concerns.

The four Combaticons were, once again, lined up in a row along the beach. Swindle was the only one managing to keep his face out of the sand. As Blast Off came into sight, the conmech grimaced and bowed before the invisible force of the slave coding's disapproval.

Heavy footsteps gave away her approach, even if they couldn't see her. Vortex's rotors spun, and his voice cracked as he plaintively asked, "He'll be back, right? He's not...we're not bad because he went to go fishing. It's a thing animals do. They gotta eat." Brawl grunted from beside him, and the helicopter's voice cut off in a muted whine. Both mechs burrowed their masks into the sand as their sensor networks rolled a long wave of agony through them.

"I know that I've done nothing wrong," Onslaught said hoarsely into his own patch of sand. "Logic's not helping."

Okay, time to see how much authority she really had as head slave. Blast Off steeled her nerve.

"Our master prefers the company of his family. We are slow and not yet fully adapted to the ocean," Blast Off informed them, attempting firm belief in her own words. "It's our responsibility to be ready for his return. We are, hmm, establishing a secure location instead joining his family group. If he wishes us to accompany him to a new location, he will inform us. Perhaps he is waiting for us to be ready to travel."

She waited, expecting the programming to reject her reasoning and strike her down to grovel in the sand like the others, but -

One by one, the other Combaticons slowly relaxed. She could hardly believe it. It _worked_. She really did have authority as their owner's favored toy!

Certain duties came with the position, however. Blast Off winced as the slave code highlighted the appropriate file in warning. Voluntarily stepping up as the head of the harem meant it was going to pile duties on her. It was her duty to keep the other slaves online and in line, and the code reminded her that there were inspections to be done.

"Transmit your status updates," she commanded quietly. Brawl, Vortex, and Swindle didn't hesitate, transmitting the status of their internal changes. They looked too relieved to question why she wanted them. From his spot kneeling in the sand, Onslaught shot her a murderous look of betrayal that she refused to acknowledge. After glaring for a short while, Onslaught finally followed the order. He seemed to realize that arguing over it would only grind his pride against reality until nothing was left but submission.

Blast Off pored over the data for a moment before she saw what she'd feared. "Swindle. Your...womb," that never got any easier to say, "is complete."

The Jeep shifted uncomfortably. "Yeah. Says I've got to run a test, but I don't know what kind of test it is."

Brawl squeamishly inched away from his - now her - side. Not that the tank was in any position to be grossed out by what was happening inside his own body.

Blast Off didn't want to do this. Really. She didn't think about the part of her that actually did, for reasons Swindle would discover for herself soon enough. Despite the loathing that filled her mind, the shuttle's body informed her it was willing for another go. Mentally stomping on the rampant lust worked about as well as could be expected, which was not at all.

Defeated, she folded down to sit cross-legged in the sand and carefully retrieved the stick she'd painstakingly searched the other end of the island for. It was kind of necessary for the test. Once she'd figured out a viable procedure, it'd taken another half an hour to find anything suitable to use.

It wasn't a big stick. Absolutely tiny by the standards of giant metal robots, but not too big nor too small according to the criteria of her newly functional equipment. She had difficulty holding onto it because it was shorter than even the first knuckle of her finger and thin enough that she'd snapped her first two sticks before getting the hang of how much pressure wood could take.

"What's that?" Brawl asked, and Blast Off looked up. The other Combaticons were watching her with varying expressions of curiosity.

She ignored the question and beckoned to Swindle. "Come here."

"Why?" Swindle was already getting up and walking over, but she looked at Blast Off like she was crazy when the shuttle pointed downward. "What?"

"Lay over my knees," Blast Off commanded. This was going to be awkward no matter the position, but the opening that needed testing was tucked underneath Swindle's chest in rootmode. It would work, so long as the mech - wait, was that the proper term anymore? They were female only in organic terms, not mechanical, right? - stretched out.

"Why?" Swindle asked again. She clearly didn't want to, but she allowed the shuttle to pull her closer until her knees pressed to the larger Combaticon's knee. The hand attempting to push her down over Blast Off's lap was resisted. "What're you doing? Stop it!"

Blast Off gazed at her levelly. "The test."

"Oh." She still didn't get it, but the slave code caused a visible flare of her optics as it kicked her in the back of the cortex. "Um...okay, but why do I have to do **this**?" She laid forward slowly, guided down until she draped over Blast Off's legs. Short legs flailed for a moment before she drew them up, leaving her kneeling in the shuttle's lap with her feet hooked over one knee, chest flat to the other, and arms almost hugging that same knee for balance.

"Because it has to be tested," Blast Off sighed and put her arm over the mech's back, wrapping it around and under to probe for what her HUD overlay said would be there.

Swindle made an odd noise as one blunt, too-large finger found what it was poking about for. The other three Combaticons stared. Blast Off passed the stick to the appropriate hand before lightly restraining her small teammate.

The odd sound repeated as the stick gently nosed in. "Whaaa…" Swindle reset her vocalizer. "Uh, Blast Off? What's that?"

"A stick."

"I **know** it's a stick!" Swindle shot her an irritated, somewhat alarmed glare. "What the slag did you just **do** with it?"

Embarrassment swept Blast Off strong enough to blister paint, but in reality it did nothing more than trigger her fans. They whirred loudly, which didn't make holding Swindle like this any easier.

She kept her voice leeched of emotion as she gave the stick the tiniest push. In Cybertronian terms, it was a negligible measure. In organic terms, it bottomed out Swindle's brand new orifice. "This is called penetration," she told the Jeep, because explaining the humiliation was all part of the slave experience, apparently.

Dawning comprehension lit Swindle's face, big purple optics mortified. She gave an uneasy squirm. "Oh. It feels weird. I expected it to…I don't even know what I expected." She hugged the shuttle's knee tighter as if to anchor herself.

Shock hit Onslaught and Vortex next as they got it. _Oh_. Vortex's rotors flicked, spinning twice in a quick whirl that betrayed his discomfort. Onslaught just looked away.

Brawl still seemed confused by what was going on, but Blast Off had no intention of explain further and Swindle just shrugged after a second of adjusting to the intrusion. "It's not bad. I barely notice it's there."

That was a lie. Blast Off didn't call her on it. Swindle was probably referring to the physical invasion, not the mental repercussions of the probing. The way she avoided looking in the direction of the others was a dead give-away of what she felt.

The embarrassment was, however, only going to get worse from here.

Blast Off reset her vocalizer, stifling an awkward urge to apologize. "…to test the full function of the mod, you must be aware that the stick represents our master's genitalia."

Vortex barked a laugh on reflex. The rest of them certainly didn't see any humor in the situation. Onslaught and Brawl both recoiled. Swindle twisted to gape up at Blast Off.

The change-over was almost audible. The shuttle remembered it vividly herself, recalling the moment she made a connection between stick and owner. It clicked something together in the slave code. Their Lord and Master was, right this moment, fucking Swindle by proxy.

Swindle's body reacted accordingly.

Motor roaring to life, Swindle arched up off Blast Off's knee so hard her struts creaked. Her vocalizer choked out a high-pitched noise. Armor abruptly went from sun-warmed to baking hot as the Jeep's systems jumped from neutral to high gear in the space of a few seconds.

Blast Off braced a hand on the smaller Combaticon's shoulders to keep her down. Meanwhile, most of her concentration was on not breaking the stick she was ever-so-carefully tweaking in its tight little hole.

A tight hole connected to thread-thin traceries of pressure sensors and nerve wires built so sensitive the relatively smooth surface of the stick felt like sandpaper inside it. Densely packed circuitry built to mimic foreign, alien senses transmitted exactly as programmed. This was no jack sliding into a socket. Blast Off's own body heated in excitement as she manipulated the stick, turning it in her fingers like a drill so it rubbed against the sides and bottom of Swindle in a hard twist.

The stick didn't compromise, but the elastic material jam-packed with firing sensors _did_. It contracted around the stick and loosened a second later, rippling as the pressure changed from second to second, and Swindle cried out. Electric thrill translated into a give, a _stretch_ that was purely organic. Metal didn't have it, metal couldn't mimic it, and metal wasn't constructed to understand it.

The slave code gave Swindle's frame no room for error, hijacking her sensor network. It ruthlessly rewrote what should have been frighteningly alien and incomprehensible into the epitome of good. It mainlined utmost pleasure straight from the new hardware - wetware - into every working sensor in the slave's body. Cybertronians weren't designed for sex, not how Earth did it, but the slave code took their natural forms and _changed_ the programming that ran them. It rewrote them until _submission_ to their owner's fundamentally different body feel so very, very right.

"Oh Primus, oh. **Blast Off!** " Huge fingers flexed the tiniest bit, and the stick stirred. Overwhelmed by a fresh flood of sensations that weren't physically possible, Swindle's garbled cry became a plea. The hole clenched, the protective flaps covering it trying to pull the stick deeper and keep it in place. A slickness coated the inside now, contained by the outer lips. Both pairs worked together to create a water-tight seal that sucked greedily at the stick. Swindle curled as pleasure too fluid to be anything but organic drenched her body and shook her with its power. Only by the hand pinning her down kept her from bucking right off the legs she clawed at. "Blast Off!"

Blast Off remembered how it felt. She hesitated before giving the stick a shallow thrust.

Swindle _screamed_. The rasping pant of her ventilation fans sputtering underlaid the shriek, and the Jeep writhed. Ecstasy tore sounds from her throat that sent Onslaught and Brawl backpedalling down the beach, kicking up sand as they scrambled away. Vortex just stared as if mesmerized.

It didn't take long. Their new reproductive systems were meant to turnover in time with their master's completion. That didn't make the short time span any less intense, as Blast Off knew well. The finale, the climax, wasn't the sharp crackling release of an overload as they knew it. Tension coiled in rhythmic surges, turning tighter and tighter on the peak of every thrust until it unraveled in a hot gush that rattled plating and melted reason. It was a clenching action, a hungry milking _spasm_ that had nothing of mechanical parts or pieces about it.

Swindle gave one last cry and stiffened in her first orgasm.

Blast Off's own body shuddered in remembered pleasure, restlessly clenching a part of herself that suddenly felt achingly empty and unpleasantly damp. She pulled the stick free and tumbled the smaller Combaticon off her lap.

Swindle twitched, trying to make uncooperative limbs less limp but ending up as a heap on the sand when the effort failed. Still taking in huge, gulping pants of air, the Jeep blearily peered up at her. "Is it…gonna be like…that…every time?"

"I have no idea." And she wasn't going to admit that she wanted to find out.

An update pinged through the gestalt links. Blast Off sighed and beckoned the next of her fellow slaves down. Onslaught looked between her and Swindle, then took a step back as if to flee. The slave code was having none of it.

Onslaught grunted quietly, bending double in the sand under punishment. No resistance. Slaves _submit._

Blast Off held the stick away from herself as she waited. The end of the stick had a wet sheen on it. She tried not to think about it.

This was the worst day ever.

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 **A/N: Stick-y sex was a pun that had to be made, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.**


	5. Pt 5: Xenophilia

**[* * * * *]**

 _**Pt. 5:**_ _"_ Xenophilia (specifically where the Cybertronian is being held down and given The Bad Touch) _"_

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The only thing more fitting would have been if their owner took Brawl first. There would have been a certain poetic justice to that. It was the tankformer's fault that they were attempting to seduce a rubbery Earth beast, after all, and Onslaught wasn't above a bit of vengeance. If Brawl had kept his revulsion tactful in the slightest, the other Combaticons wouldn't be suffering. Blast Off's peculiar 'job' would have remained a one-mech function within the unit. Harem. Whatever their group was, now.

Brawl _deserved_ humiliation.

Unfortunately, it no longer felt like humiliation. It didn't even feel as benign as duty. It _felt_ like a compulsion. Physical need gnawed into their brain modules and ran fire down their wires, arousal sandpapering their sensors down to raw activation at the slightest brush of metal or water. Dolphins did nothing for Onslaught's mind, but his body _lusted_ for the creatures, now. His body felt and felt, dragging his horrified thoughts along for the ride. The slave code changed him inside and out. Equipment onlined, swiftly followed by protocols twisting his natural reactions around until he wanted, then he needed, then he _craved ._

Brawl lagged in seductive ability compared to what the other Combaticons learned to do. Not that they hadn't started out on equal footing sloshing around in the ocean queasily offering their respective… _holes_ …to the dolphin, but their Lord and Master apparently didn't recognize custom-remodeled Cybertronian sex slaves when they threw themselves at him. Seducing him took more effort than just transforming to present. Enticing him to use them required trial and error.

Hence why Blast Off continued his - _her -_ reign as head of the harem, and Brawl failed to be first. Onslaught loathed the envy he felt when Blast Off finally succeeded in her efforts, but he'd never learned to control his ambition. The last time he'd gotten powerhungry, Shockwave had spark-boxed the whole unit. Onslaught should have learned the lesson then, but no. Even slaves had an internal hierarchy. Onslaught might not be able to unseat Blast Off as first and favored, but he knew exactly what he had to do to stay her second.

And it felt right, too. Better to be second than the lowest ranking slave in the harem. Onslaught recoiled mentally from his duty, but his body enthusiastically supported the idea.

"How likely is it that the opportunity to mate will keep him closer to us?" he asked as he waded out beside Blast Off.

The question earned interested looks from the Swindle and Vortex. Brawl was still a miserable lump of denial on the beach, but the other two Combaticons had decided days ago that participating in, er, harem duties was far preferable to torture. None of them could fight the slave code that ruled their minds and bodies.

"Dolphins seem to chase sex almost as much as humans," Swindle said after poring over their limited data. "Might work!"

Vortex had a better optic for behavioral quirks, but he shrugged helplessly at their inquiring looks. "Not really my specialty, guys." Give him a Cybertronian to interrogate, and he'd have the mech analyzed down to component parts. Dolphins had completely different psychology. The slave code had adapted disturbingly well to an organic beast as their owner, but Vortex was out of his depth, here.

Inter-species communication had improved, at least. Blast Off had cobbled together a sort of sonar ping from her communications array that worked underwater. None of them were precisely sure what the ping said in dolphin, but it certainly gained the pod's attention. Dolphins were curious animals. Settling into the water on her back pinging them had prompted close investigation of her altmode, and eventually, a kind of sonar-ping game - hot/cold, getting cooler, getting warmer, warmer, warmer, _hot -_ had brought their owner to the right spot. After that, it had only been a matter of time.

Overturned onto her altmode roof, Blast Off hardly looked comfortable. She didn't complain. Stoic, thy name was Blast Off. "While I understand you want to keep our Master nearby," she said without flinching at the degrading title, "he has to eat. Ready access to pleasure won't change his feeding habits. He's been leaving with his family unit as per usual."

"He returns faster," Swindle hazarded. "I think?"

Blast Off had more experience with the dolphin pod. "Not noticeably. His family unit departs and returns within the same schedule. They return to us when they require entertainment, and that's a fickle interest."

Onslaught's mind ticked over, turning the problem around to study it from every angle. "Swindle, how much fish can you order airlifted in?"

The conartist looked canny one second but depressed the next, deflating with a sigh. "I…it's not what I can order. I can't finalize anything without permission."

Which, they already knew, they couldn't obtain. Not even Blast Off's limited authority extended to financial decisions.

But Onslaught had a different solution ready. He'd just wanted to avoid it if at all possible. He'd noticed the dolphins swarming Blast Off's new orifice all had one trait in common, and only Blast Off's refusal to open in offer had kept the male dolphins at bay. The sole dolphin allowed to mount her took frequent advantage of that fact, even if he sometimes had to struggle through the cluster of eager erections in his way.

Even as Onslaught watched, his Lord and Master wriggled around another rubbery, tubular fish-mammal in order to slip belly-to-belly with Blast Off. The curved, hard penis the Combaticons unwillingly craved plunged into the tiny hole opened to it, and a few seconds of subdued thrashing commenced. Blast Off made a choked noise before cutting off her vocalizer. Onslaught forced himself to keep watching. Stubby shuttle wings twitched. Biolights suddenly flashed.

Blast Off didn't say anything as the dolphin withdrew from her, but she wouldn't. An organic orgasm, they'd found, took far more out of them then the overloads they were used to. Overload was a quick snap of circuitbreakers, and it took more to rile them up each time the electricity was interrupted. The slave code didn't allow them that rest period. Dolphins evidently had a short refraction period, and the Combaticons' new organic-compatible equipment wrung them out in extended afterglows and short but intense orgasms that upset all their systems.

Blast Off was exhausted. Obedient, but exhausted.

Onslaught fought a losing battle against himself. Fists closed tight, he finally lowered himself to his knees in the warm ocean water. "Extended access to as much sex as they want will tire his family," he said out loud as he slowly transformed, shifting gradually to avoid scaring the pod swimming around him. "The more of his family unit that shares his unwillingness or inability to travel far, the closer to us they'll stay."

It took a second to sink in.

Vortex choked on thin air. "You're - you're talking about - " He stopped and looked ill.

Swindle looked no less sick, but he finished the thought out loud. "Servicing the whole pod. Tire them out, and they'll stick around."

Plus, ready access to sex would be a lure to the other males in the pod, but Onslaught couldn't make himself say that. "Sex with an Earth creature is sex with an Earth creature," he said, reaching for logic. He needed cool detachment to go through with this. "It doesn't make a difference once you think about it."

The slave code disagreed, of course, but the Combaticons had come to the grim, silent consensus that the slave code could be reasoned with. In a way. Generally not a pleasant way, and not using reason, but it could sometimes be soothed into grudging approval if they didn't push or demand. Beg, yes, and persuade, but not demand. Slave didn't demand, ever.

Onslaught packaged his idea in layers of submission and desire to please, wrapped himself in meek humility, and did his best to convince himself that the arousal flooding his sensor network applied to the rest of the dolphin pod. A good slave to his Lord and Master would seek to please his owner by pleasing all of the dolphins. They were obviously a social species. So long as he remembered his owner always had first access, surely a good slave would ensure a supply of pleasure for the entire extended family unit. Right?

After scrutinizing his thoughts for the smallest sign of Bad Slave, the code settled down. It took a while. Onslaught felt stripped bare by the time it subsided, but it kept his mind temporarily off reality for the brief seconds before he folded completely into his altmode. That was good enough for the moment.

Buoyed up by brand new flotation devices, Onslaught bobbed up and down on the mild waves. It made his fuel tanks slosh unpleasantly. He'd never been seasick, but then again, he hadn't spent much time on the ocean before. It really didn't help that the tiny slit opening and closing on his undercarriage felt every single water current swirling against it like a teasing brush of flesh and heat. The hole had only become more sensitive since its activation test.

Onslaught shuddered, remembering. Memory was strong. Orgasm still flushed heat through his wires and made him damp deep inside. He hated the power the equipment protocols had, hated how his body craved his owner, but he was powerless to fight the currents of pleasure rippling out from each clench and release.

Either the dolphins could smell the holes now, or they were smarter than Onslaught had given them credit for. Possibly both. Dolphins could learn, according to human documentaries. If one metal creature wanted to frag, then the dolphins would explore whether this one did, too.

Swindle and Vortex shifted from foot to foot up on the beach as Onslaught shivered, engine shifting up to a thin whine audible where they stood. He offlined his vocalizer, but like Blast Off, the visible cues still existed. No matter how disciplined a soldier he was on the battlefield, every moving part on him cringed and winced now.

The worst part was the difference. He had just enough sensors on his underside to keep track of the one moving shape tagged as _Master ._ The others got to him first, however, and he'd been wrong. There was a difference between being fucked by a normal dolphin and serving his Master.

Logically, it shouldn't hurt. He'd done more injury to himself drilling holes for a weapons mount, and he'd never flinched from that. Yet the stiff, curved piece of flesh thrust past the lips into his shallow orifice nearly clawed a yelp from his vocalizer before he could shut it off, and Onslaught cringed. The damp wetness slicking him turned icy, and all the hot eager lust running fire down his wires chilled to a profound sense of _wrong wrong wrong ._ It _hurt_. The dolphin taking him turned the squicky, squishy pleasure his Master controlled into a burning _cold_ , a sickening sensation as an alien organ thrust inside him where the slave code tore him apart to feel every second as violation.

Onslaught jolted in the water, tires spinning uselessly, but the dolphin took his pleasure without stopping. After him came another, and another, the male dolphins rubbing against his undercarriage as if pushing him to be ready faster when he couldn't stop them from taking him over and over.

"Onslaught?"

"Hey, Onslaught. Hey."

"Respond, fraggit!"

Distantly, he could hear the other Combaticons calling, worry and fear for themselves thick in their voices. He couldn't respond. This had been a terrible mistake he couldn't correct, the slave coding sternly holding him in place. It forced him to accept the thrust and plunge deep into his vulnerable, sensor-laced hole, holding him open and receptive despite how very much he wanted to recoil. Onslaught wanted to clamp himself shut and transform, stumbling back up to the safety of the sand with his armor flat to his body in futile defense against the small Earth mammals in the water. He couldn't stop jerking, jolting, seizing up in sickened reflex as he was gangraped by an organic species that took what he had to offer.

Feet splashed into the water, and he heard without comprehending the sound of transformation as Blast Off stood up, three people reaching out to haul him free of the violation.

Shock wheezed a stifled groan out around vocalizer lockdown as a particular dolphin took his turn. " **Hnnngh!** "

The slave code stopped the other three Combaticons dead. Onslaught couldn't appreciate their attempt to help him, too stunned by the abrupt whiplash from revolted horror to terrible, overwhelming, system-straining pleasure. His engine _roared_ , startling the dolphin pressed to his underside, but the quick flick as his owner pulled loose tore a scream of protest out of him. Pleasure dropped into a pit of aching loss.

Punishment. Punishment for not submitting as a slave should, the code wrote directly into his equipment protocols, overriding any thought to the contrary, and it wasn't about what Onslaught thought. It was never about what a slave thought. It was about what the slave code dictated, and that determined how a slave _felt ._ Onslaught moaned in despair as the sore lips of his hole quivered, longing to be used, because only further use would pay for displeasing his owner. His owner clearly would only reward him with sex if he submitted fully to the rest of the pod, accepting the abuse as a way to appease his Lord and Master.

He couldn't move from the water. He couldn't protest. "Leave me," he croaked at the others, and if his spark flinched inside him, there wasn't anything he could do about it.

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End file.
